Excerpt from A Book of Drawings
For instance, there is a delightful design in this book representing the secret and hideous crime of the gentleman who filled a fountain-pen with the ink in the hotel. It is exceedingly funny. But it is not so funny as it would be ifa man in a hotel were allowed to fill forty fountain - pens and ten large bottles with ink, but were strictly forbidden ever to dip his pen in the ink, taking only what he needed at the moment for addressing an envelope or signing a cheque. It would be funnier still if the law which allowed him to take a bottleful, but forbade him to take a pen-full, were called a law for the saving of ink. Yet that is literally and exactly the condition of the existing law foravoiding excess in wine or whisky. A man is not allowed to buy the moderate amount he wants. But he is allowed to buy an immoderate amount in excess of his wants. He is allowed to bear away a bottle of brandy much bigger than a bottle of ink; but he is not allowed to take a drop hardly bigger than the drop on the point of a pen. Now you cannot satirise a law like that; any more than you could satirise the statement that black is white, or that yes is the same as no. You cannot refute what is entirely irrational, any more than you can answer the question of Why is a mouse when it spins Ican imagine Mr. Bateman giving us a dizzy, delirious and doubtless delightful drawing of a mouse when it spins, but hardly of why it spins. And I can imagine him giving us an equally exuberant exhibition of a stampede of stout struggling policemen to arrest a man sipping a small glass of sherry hardly larger than a liqueur while processions of placid and smiling persons, clasping colossal bottles of gin and brandy, passed by like a calm and continuous background. But this very thing, which the artist might draw as a lark, the politician has already established as a law. And even Mr. Bateman could not draw the mind of the politician who conceived such a regulation. It is beyond the last visions of Futurism and the Fourth Dimension.
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